Sandy Chang was this girl I knew in elementary school that could fucking spell. Asclepiadaceous? A-S-C-L-E-P-I-A-D-A-C-E-O-U-S. Gibberellic? G-I-B-B-E-R-E-L-L-I-C. Chlamydia? C-H-L… well, you get the point.

Day in, day out, that weird little spelling troll was perusing the dictionary. Her parents would quiz her every morning before she went to school, or at the dinner table, or while she was brushing her teeth before bed. Spell spell spell spell spell spell spell. What is the latin root, can you use the word in a question, whatever. She was a freaking spelling hurricane. And she scared me.

When I, horrified, told my parents about Sandy Chang, they of course replied, “You should learn to spell better than Sandy Chang. Why don’t you study like her?”

For lack of an answer, I could only run off crying to the yard to practice running after T-ball grounders with a rarely-if-ever-actually-used baseball glove. Goddamn my inability to catch.

Ultimately, this all brings us to today, when I finally discovered precisely WHY I didn’t apply myself to the good word like that fucking freako Sandy Chang.